With the New Year less than two weeks away, not a few entreps are figuring out their 2014 resolutions. Never mind that most of didn’t keep the ones we made for this year. Only 8% of people who make New Year’s resolutions are able to meet them.
But 8% isn’t so bad compared to 0% after all. As the Beastie Boys lyric goes:
“It’s like lotto–you gotta be in it to win it”.
Resolutions are just another form of goal-setting. Nearly every successful business that didn’t make it from sheer dumb luck alone uses some form of goal-setting by default. Approach your 2014 resolution the same way you would any other goal for your enterprise and it could pay off both personally and professionally.
What Resolutions Should I Make?
A couple of months ago, the always interesting Anna Vital came up with this pretty self-explanatory mind map on “How To Be Productive”. Most resolutions are after all, about creating habits that in turn create success. We feel this mind map’s a good starting point for a lot of useful New Year’s resolutions.
anna.vc – How To Be Productive
On her site, Anna Vital explains her mind map:
There is one thing in common between Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg – they all wear the same thing every day. Barack chooses between two suits every morning – grey or navy, Zuckerberg has a drawer of 20 identical grey t- shirts. When each of them were asked why they do this, the answer is to save time and avoid making small decisions so they can be more productive.
We’d already explained this same idea in previous articles, but this just drives the point that success – the kind not driven purely by dumb luck – is a matter of playing the game and setting up the right patterns.
Make Success a Habit!
Creating productive habits is key to continuous success. It’s what will allow you to maximize It is far, far easier said than done. In a previous article Setting Your-Autopilot: 8 Ways to Streamline Decision-making Habits, we outlined a few strategies to make this a bit simpler.
The reason why so few people ever succeed at their resolutions is the same reason so few get any lasting success in business. We don’t develop the knack for drudgery and repetition. Really, overcoming distaste for those things is a large part of succeeding at anything.
Forming good habits and letting go of counter-productive ones might be the toughest things you’ll do all year – but they’re going to be the most worthwhile.
Sources and Additional Reading
Want to Create a New Habit?: Get Ready To Break It – LifeHacker
Habit Formation – Psychology Today
Self Regulation Failure – Goal Setting And Monitoring – Psychology Today
Habits are Everything – Psychology Today
Image Credits
How To Be Productive -Anna Vital via Funders and Founders
Tired bunchadogs & susan [kinda off] via photopin cc
Marathon: darkmatter via photopin cc